Tag Archives: jessie

I bought a USB Wireless dongle from AVM called Fritz!Wlan USB Stick N v2. The wireless chipset of this dongle is usually Ralink RT5572 (this device has had a few revisions, hence the v2 should be this Ralink chipset) which is supported under Linux by the rt2800usb module.

This dongle is particular, it is first seen as a CD drive. This is meant for Windows users so that the system will automatically install the correct driver, eject the CD and then transform itself into a Wireless dongle. On other platform, it also shows up as a CD drive, if you eject it (automatically or manually) it becomes a Wireless dongle.

Once you plug it, you can view it on Linux directly running: lsusb -d 057c:. However depending on your version of Linux, it might shows as a CD, broken, or potentially in the future as a Wireless device.

On Debian Wheezy, it was seen as a CD drive. A simple manual eject command and it is working. Slightly annoying, but fine.

On Debian Jessie (which uses systemd) and on Fedora 22 (also using systemd), the device is not mounting as a CD not as a Wireless dongle. So you can’t use it.

I don’t know why, but there is a package (already installed on both distribution by default) named usb-modeswitch which tries to be clever and detects USB devices like the one from AVM and do automatically for you the necessary kirks to make it work as intended. It seems that an Wheezy, it was not triggered. But on Jessie and Fedora 22, it was triggered but wrongly configured.

I have the solution which work flawlessly on both distributions and will allow you to just plug your USB dongle and see it as a wireless device (as expected! Thanks AVM x-( )

You either need to create or modify the file /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/057c:62ff so that it contains exactly the following text:

Side note: this device is pretty cool if you need to do advanced wireless stuff. For example, it is possible to build a WiFi rogue AP detector with this device and some tools.

Picture credits: Picture was created by me using elements from the KDE project. The original materials were licensed under GNU LGPLv3, and the picture is also provided under this license terms and conditions.

Our computers are not really good at providing random numbers because they are quite deterministic (unless you count these pesky random bugs that make working on a computer so “enjoyable”). So we created different ways to generate pseudo-random numbers of various qualities depending on the use. For cryptography, it is paramount to have excellent random numbers, or an attacker could predict our next move!

Getting unpredictable is a difficult task, Linux tries to provide it by collecting environmental noise (e.g. disk seek time, mouse movement, etc.) in a first entropy pool which feeds a first Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator (CSPRNG) which then output “sanitised” random numbers to different pools, one for each of the kernel output random device: /dev/random and /dev/urandom.

Our goal is to help our Raspberry Pi to have more entropy, so we will provide it with a new entropy collector based on its on-board hardware random number generator (HW RNG).

This article is an update for all of you who upgraded their Raspbian to Jessie (Debian 8). The new system uses SystemD for the init process rather than Upstart for previous release.

The Raspberry Pi has an integrated hardware random number generator (HW RNG) which Linux can use to feed its entropy pool. The implication of using such HW RNG is debatable and I will discuss it in a coming article. But here is how to activate it.

It is still possible to load the kernel module using $ sudo modprobe bcm2708-rng. But I know recommend using the Raspberry Pi boot configuration, as it is more future proof: if there is a newer module for the BCM2709 in the Raspberry Pi 2 (or any newer model), using Raspberry Pi Device Tree (DT) overlays should always work. DT are a mean to set-up your Raspberry Pi for certain tasks by selecting automatically the right modules (or drivers) to load. It is possible to activate the HW RNG using this methods.
Actually, we do not need to load any DT overlays, but only to set the random parameter to ‘on‘. You can achieve this by editing the file /boot/config.txt, find the line starting with ‘dtparam=(...)‘ or add a new one starting with it. The value of dtparam is a comma separated list of parameters and value (e.g random=on,audio=on), see part 3 of the Raspberry Pi documentation for further info. So at least, you should have:

dtparam=random=on

With this method, you have to reboot so that the bootloader can pick-up automatically the right module for you.

Now install the rng-tools (the service should be automatically activated and started, default configuration is fine, but you can tweak/amend it in /etc/default/rng-tools), and set it to be enable at next boot:

$ sudo apt-get install rng-tools
$ sudo systemctl enable rng-tools

After awhile you can check the level of entropy in your pool and some stats on the rng-tools service: